Earth Sciences

A recent study by a team of Syracuse University geologists has punched holes in a relatively new theory of species evolution called coordinated stasis; the theories involved are based on findings from fossil-bearing rocks that underlie Central New York. The SU study was published in “Geology,” the premier journal of the Geological Society of America.
First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated

In honor of the Earth Day celebration, NASA scientists unveiled the first consistent and continuous global measurements of Earth’s “metabolism.” Data from the Terra and Aqua satellites are helping scientists frequently update maps of the rate at which plant life on Earth is absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere.

Combining space-based measurements of a range of plant properties collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with a suite of other satellite and su

It might be 500,000 years or five years, but the Central Valley of Costa Rica will definitely experience major volcanic activity again, according to Phillip B. Gans, professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He presented a study of volcanic rocks of Costa Rica in his recent talk at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“The Costa Ricans were not around for the last big one, but it’s inevitable,” said Gans. “Another pyroclastic flow like the

Researchers found surprising evidence of sea salt and frozen plankton in high, cold, cirrus clouds, the remnants of Hurricane Nora, over the U.S. plains states. Although the 1997 hurricane was a strong eastern Pacific storm, her high ice-crystal clouds extended many miles inland, carrying ocean phenomena deep into the U.S. heartland.

Kenneth Sassen of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and University of Alaska Fairbanks; W. Patrick Arnott of the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno,

The bizarre hydrothermal vent field discovered a little more than two years ago surprised scientists not only with vents that are the tallest ever seen – the one that’s 18 stories dwarfs most vents at other sites by at least 100 feet – but also because the fluids forming these vents are heated by seawater reacting with million-year-old mantle rocks, not by young volcanism.

The remarkable Lost City hydrothermal vent field, so named partly because it sits on a seafloor mountain named the

Our post-ice-age climate is not nearly as stable as is commonly believed. New evidence for this is reported by geoscientists of the DFG Research Center Ocean Margins in the upcoming issue of the journal Science. Investigating marine sediments from the northern Red Sea, they discovered that this currently very dry region was influenced by a long wet period between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago. It was characterized by a monsoon-like system during that time. The possibility that this Mediterranean monsoon